When Netflix announced it was recreating one of psychology’s most notorious, unethical studies for a reality show, backlash was immediate. Given reality TV’s tendency to exploit, psychologists (armchair and professional) and academics questioned how Netflix’s version, produced for entertainment, could possibly be ethical.
Conducted in 1971 by Stanford University professor Philip Zimbardo, the experiment divided 24 college-aged men into mock inmates or prison guards. Intended to run for two weeks, the simulation ended after six days, as guards enacted a series of cruel punishments leading to emotional and psychotic breakdowns. While its findings are discounted due to the experiment’s many ethical failures, it maintains a strong footing in pop culture – a perverse story of depravity ripe for multiple documentaries, podcasts, films and recreations (the BBC reenacted it for a documentary series in 2002).
From the outset, I found Netflix’s version repellant: a potential new low for reality TV that turns prison into a playpen that subjects its participants to potential cruelty and all but ensures abuse from viewers who will be disgusted by some of the actions. That still sits true now that I’ve watched all six episodes. But it also sits uneasy, as this is one of the most confronting, thought-provoking reality shows I’ve watched in a long time.
Executive produced by reality TV power-duo Jane Lipsitz and Dan Cutforth ( Project Runway, Top Chef ), it places 30 Americans – eight guards, three of them female, and 22 prisoners – in a decommissioned area of an active prison in Georgia to ask if power corrupts. It’s a question that the show’s experts – Pulitzer-winning journalist Trymaine Lee, psychologist Alison Wood Brooks and retired correctional officer Michael Cantrell – return to again and again with little insight, perhaps because the answer (yes, duh!) is apparent to anyone alive.
While avoiding specifics, Netflix’s version is, thankfully, nowhere as depraved as Zimbardo’s experiment. Beyond the ethical (and insurance) safeguards in place, perhaps knowing that millions will watch this was a deterrent for many participants to go all out – but not all, with subtle and dramatic cruelties on display.
Underneath the pseudo-psychology and reality TV twists is the show’s much more poignant – albeit not directly stated – point. Again and again, we see the dehumanising effect the US prison system (the world’s largest prison population with 1.8 million people incarcerated according to the World Prison Brief ) has on both guards and incarcerated people: how it pushes people towards their worst selves.
“This is turning me back into the f---ing person I used to be,” says one formerly incarcerated prisoner. “I spent a lot of time bettering myself as a person … I don’t want to be that guy anymore.”
There’s no doubt several punishments and big moments will create outrage. But it’s the small moments of insight such as the above – as well as the revealing differences as to how a person’s race and class informed their time on the show – that will hopefully stay with people and start more impactful conversations.
The New Stanford Prison Experiment is on Netflix now.
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